Yeah - it must be literally breathtaking!
I have been wondering if it might be a bonus for such things, if you are used to jumping from heights into nothing like I sort of am from lucid flying.
Shame I can't post the latest Attenborough docu on the evolution of flight on earth "Conquest of the Skies" - whoever can - watch it, it's great!!
And it has the Colugo - happens very seldom that I come across an animal I don't know yet. I posted about it in another forum and now cheekily insert this here as well.
This is it - the first mammal to take to the skies, before even bats evolved they were already gliding about:
The nose!! I have such a thing for lovely strange animal noses!
And it's got an interesting expression as well - somehow stoical.
Its closest relatives are we primates and this little guy and glides about at night in South East Asia having fantastic eyes with great depth perception, no idea, why they tend to reflect light so strangely. Their teeth are shaped like combs and nobody knows, what they do with them. Most astonishing - their range is over 200 feet! With baby hanging on!
Once they've glided down too low to take off again, they start flappingly hopping up their trees and proceed from there.
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Their most distinctive feature is the membrane of skin that extends between their limbs and gives them the ability to glide long distances between trees. Of all the gliding mammals, the colugos have the most extensive adaptation to flight. Their gliding membrane, or patagium, is as large as is geometrically possible: it runs from the shoulder blades to the fore paw, from the tip of the rear-most finger to the tip of the toes, and from the hind legs to the tip of the tail; unlike in other known gliding mammals, even the spaces between the fingers and toes are webbed to increase the total surface area, as in the wings of bats. As a result, colugos were traditionally considered being close to the ancestors of bats, but are now seen by some as the closest living relatives to primates.
They are surprisingly clumsy climbers. Lacking opposable thumbs and not being especially strong, they proceed upwards in a series of slow hops, gripping onto the bark of trees with their small, sharp claws. They are as comfortable hanging underneath a branch as sitting on top of it. In the air, however, they are very capable, and can glide as far as 70 m (230 ft) from one tree to another with minimal loss of height.
Originally Posted by WIRED
...Colugos are primates’ closest living relatives. So although calling them “flying lemurs” is a misnomer, both because colugos aren’t flying but gliding and they’re not a kind of lemur, the name isn’t that far off.
“Because they have these adaptations for gliding, originally people sort of threw them in with bats,” Janecka said. “But when they looked at the actual morphology of the skull, there was evidence that they’re closely related to primates.” When Janecka and his colleagues did a genomic analysis of the colugo, this suspicion was confirmed. It turns out that around 90 million years ago, at the height of the dinosaurs’ reign when mammals were just tiny furballs scurrying about trying not to get stepped on, the colugo’s ancestors split off from our primate lineage. Some 25 million years later, the dinosaurs’ time came to an end, leading to the explosion of mammalian diversity.
Here in action: Colugo gliding video
Baby Colugo:
Upside down Colugo - they do both, hanging under and sitting atop branches:
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